LinkedIn is an effective method for brands to generate leads and acquire customers across a wide range of industries. Research has shown that it is 277% more effective than Twitter and Facebook in generating leads for businesses.
Here we’ll take a look at the importance of social listening on LinkedIn and how it provides authentic and unfiltered insight into the perspectives of your audience.
What Is LinkedIn Social Listening and Why Is It Important?
LinkedIn social listening consists of tracking, monitoring, and analyzing conversations and mentions of brands, products, or industries on the platform. Brands can benefit from social listening by understanding how their target audience perceives their products and services, as well as identifying potential growth opportunities. This information allows brands to improve their marketing strategies, customer service, and product development. Furthermore, social listening helps to give brands an edge over their competitors by keeping up with industry trends and competitor activity.
How Can You Do Social Listening on LinkedIn?
Social listening on LinkedIn opens a new world of opportunities for brands to monitor, engage with, and develop authentic relationships with existing and potential customers. In order to do so, an effective social listening strategy is required. The steps below will help your brand incorporate LinkedIn social listening into your marketing strategy.
Set your listening goals
The first step of the social listening strategy is to establish and set specific business goals. Here are a few examples of key goals for social listening:
- Identify which products or services offered by your brand are talked about the most on social media platforms.
- Discover what your audience’s pain points are in relation to the products or services offered by your brand.
- Track negative sentiment in conversations about your brand in real-time to act swiftly to manage crises.
- Gain insights about existing products or services offered by your brand to improve or introduce new ones.
- Discover what your audience considers to be important in order to develop new content based on their preferences.
- Analyze and compare your company’s position in relation to competitors.
- Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors to help differentiate your brand and its products or services.
- Discover potential niche markets for your products or services.
Determine your audience
Next, determine who is participating in conversations about your brand and industry. Usernames, professional profiles, geographic locations, and users’ interests can be obtained through LinkedIn social listening. Social listening can also enable your marketing team to analyze which buyer personas are attracted to particular brands, products, and services, allowing you to understand how to market to your target audience on LinkedIn.
Use social listening tools
Simplify the social listening process by using tools that show you where and how people are talking about your company. Tools can:
- Monitor keywords or hashtags of your choice
- Collect public mentions across social media and other digital forums
- Send automated notifications
- Analyze the collected data into subcategories such as performance and sentiment
- Filter data based on context, which removes spam users, scams, and irrelevant mentions
Engage your audience
Social media listening tools can help your brand find user engagement opportunities. Users post about brands for several reasons: to offer praise, share excitement, criticize something about the brand or product, seek support for a technical issue, look for information about a product they are considering, or attract user attention. As a brand, responding or engaging with these human moments in comments or direct messages builds customer loyalty and improves brand reputation.
Track competition
Social monitoring and social media listening can bring you insights not just into what people are saying about your business or brand, but also into what they are saying about your competitors and your industry in general. It allows you to see how customers compare your business or brand to others, providing important information concerning your company’s positioning in the market.
It also enables you to monitor the activity of your competitors in real-time. Are they preparing to launch a new product? Are users reacting positively or negatively to their ad campaigns? The conversations tracked through social listening on LinkedIn can highlight gaps in the market that your company can fill.
Join your target audience groups
By conducting a search on LinkedIn – using keywords that are pertinent to your industry – you can find and join groups that are relevant to your business, and stay informed about the latest news trends. However, the goal is not to simply join these groups, but to actively participate in conversations to create visibility, increase brand awareness, and find potential customers – especially in groups that have a high number of followers.
Set up alerts and notifications
With LinkedIn social listening, you can set up notifications or alerts around certain metrics, such as any significant changes in the number of people talking about your brand or the sentiment of their comments, and much more.
Benefits of Social Listening on LinkedIn for Your Brand
Among the many benefits of incorporating a social listening strategy into your business, here are a few specific ones:
Track industry trends
It is no secret that social media is fast-paced and trends quickly become obsolete. But trends also offer a true opportunity to get noticed. Social listening tools help you track trends to jump on them quickly.
Social listening on LinkedIn will allow you to track relevant keywords and hashtags that are related to your industry. In this way, your company can quickly determine the latest trends and ensure that you are always a step ahead.
Furthermore, social media listening can also be used to predict future trends by analyzing not only current topics but also how past topics have evolved over time.
Understand your audience
LinkedIn social listening can provide your company with a deeper understanding of your target audience. It will enable you to gain insights into what issues they are passionate about, what kind of language they use, and what kind of content they relate to. As a result, you can tailor your content in order to meet your present or future customers’ needs and wants. Furthermore, you’ll receive insights into product improvements, or service needs based on feedback and complaints.
Generate leads
Social listening on LinkedIn is a powerful tool for generating leads as it allows your brand to:
- Find new leads or redirect leads from competitors
- Target new and diverse audience groups
- Learn about how customers search for products or services related to your brand or industry
- Find potential brand ambassadors for collaboration opportunities
Brand awareness
Awareness is the first step of a customer’s journey from not knowing your product or service at all to it becoming a household name and a fundamental expense. Community engagement is a key part of a brand awareness strategy. Use social listening tools on LinkedIn to find and engage with customers in creative ways. This gets more eyes on your feed, or topic of interest, and adds views to your existing owned content.
Enhanced customer service
Customer service via social media channels is now prevalent across all industries and platforms. This can be tricky for brands, because while their chatbot queue is available online, a customer may go to their LinkedIn to expect answers instead. Pro tip: be prepared to engage in customer service anywhere online. Social listening tools alert you to important questions or concerns that need to be addressed.
Start Using Social Listening on LinkedIn with ICUC
Social listening on LinkedIn allows you deep and actionable insight into your target customers’ needs and wants. Are you ready to start listening? Are you looking for a way to turn your customer conversations into action? ICUC can help you incorporate social listening into your marketing strategy seamlessly and without further delay.
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